A week's record of pitching a 3D textile collection to three startups in Bengaluru

Monday morning, I refilled my coffee cup twice before even opening my laptop. I was sitting in a corner seat at a café in Koramangala, rewriting a cold email draft for the eleventh time. I'd never spent this long agonising over a single subject line. I kept imagining how alien the phrase "3D rendering of ancient Indian textile patterns" would look in a startup founder's inbox.

The collection I'd been working on in Blender over the past two months is a 3D reinterpretation of the weaving structures of traditional textiles like Patola, Bandhani, and Ajrakh. I built it by stacking nodes to capture every twist of each individual thread and the texture of dye bleeding into fabric. I started the project because I loved that moment when light seeps through the weave as cloth drapes on screen, but at some point I got this urge to apply these to actual products. So I decided to pitch to three D2C fashion startups in Bengaluru.

Tuesday, the first reply

I opened my inbox in the morning and found a response from one of them. It was a team running an ethnicwear brand. A Google Meet link was attached, Wednesday at 3 PM. My heart quickened. The other two were still radio silent.

I spent the entire afternoon polishing my demo video. I set up camera angles while running real-time previews in Blender's Eevee renderer. Adding an animation of the fabric swaying in the wind made the repeating structure of the patterns much more visible. The file size grew, though, and I worried the frames might stutter during screen sharing on Meet. In the end, I exported just three key scenes as MP4s.

Wednesday, the first demo

When I joined the Meet, two people were there, the founder and the design lead. As soon as I played the video, the design lead jumped in with a question: "This Ajrakh pattern, did you use references from actual block print artisans?" I was glad to hear that. I explained the sources of the original textiles, the materials I referenced, and my working process. The conversation got deeper from there. The founder's angle was a bit different, though. "The rendering looks beautiful. But if you print this on actual fabric, will the colours come out the same?" Of course not. I was honest. There's clearly a gap between a 3D render and the real thing, and that part would require collaboration with a fabric manufacturer. After the meeting ended, I heard the words, "We'll discuss internally and get back to you." Half hopeful, half anxious.

Thursday, the other two

A reply came from the second startup in the morning. It was short. "Interesting, but we don't have budget for art direction right now." One line. The honesty was almost refreshing. At least they'd read the email.

The third company still hadn't responded, so I messaged the founder directly on LinkedIn. A reply came in the evening: "Cool work, let's hop on a call." I scheduled a call for Friday at 11 AM.

That night, at my place in HSR Layout, I modelled the double ikat structure of Patola textiles with more precision. It's a method of procedurally generating the symmetry of patterns created by the intersection of warp and weft using Geometry Nodes, but the node tree got so complex I nearly lost the whole thing at one point. Yet another reminder of how precious backups are.

Friday, and beyond

The call with the third founder went differently than expected. Rather than the textile patterns themselves, what caught their interest was the fact that I create textures by hand-building nodes without AI tools. "A lot of places are churning out textures with AI these days, but this is different. We could use it as a brand story." It was an unexpected angle. I deliberately stick to manual work because of the ethical issues around AI art, but it hadn't occurred to me that this could become a differentiator.

After the call, I was asked to send over a brief proposal. The first startup also emailed in the afternoon. They wanted to know if I could do a trial run with two patterns, and a budget range was included. I'm hesitant to share the exact amount here, but it was the kind of figure that says "let's give it a try" to a freelance 3D artist. Some might consider it low, but the fact that a door had opened was what mattered.

Looking back on the week: one of the three was out due to budget constraints, one is in discussions for a trial project, and one is at the proposal stage. I tell myself that for cold emails, this hit rate isn't bad at all. Above all, here's what I learned: startup founders spend about five seconds admiring a pretty render, and after that, all they want to know is "what story can this create for our brand?" I wasn't selling art direction. I was selling narrative.

This weekend, I'll be writing the proposal. At a café in Indiranagar, with two more cups of coffee.